STRATEGY: Spring Is Coming

Last week, the 23rd of World War II and the eleventh of its elaboration in Finland, a gigantic slushy stalemate persisted on the Western Front; a third contingent of Canadian troops arrived in England and the first Australian and New Zealand divisions landed at Suez; desultory sea sniping was continued by Germany on Allied and neutral shipping (see col. 3); and in Paris, the Allied Supreme War Council held its fifth full-dress meeting.

France’s Premier Daladier, who hobbled in on canes* to apologize for having to shift this meeting from England (the last was in France, at Amiens), later described the gathering as “formidable” (“tremendous”). Originally the Council consisted of four men: Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain and Lord Chatfield, France’s Daladier and Generalissimo Gamelin. This time Mr. Chamberlain took with him four members of his Cabinet-Lord Halifax (Foreign Affairs), Winston Churchill (Admiralty), Oliver Stanley (War), Sir Kingsley Wood (Air)—plus a number of underling specialists and General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound. M. Daladier produced their French opposite numbers and the whole Allied hierarchy sat for three hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening, with long powwows over maps for the military specialists between times. “It was the finest meeting of the War Council I ever attended,” enthused M. Daladier.

Problems of supply—food and munitions—were announced as having been specially discussed by the conferees, but the vast horizon for military action which the Council now contemplates was revealed by comments from authoritative quarters after the conferees dispersed. This horizon now stretches all the way from the Arctic Ocean around through the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the Gulf of Persia. In Paris, wise talk was about swiftly increasing aid for Finland (see p. 24). In London it was reported that M. Daladier had proposed breaking off relations with Russia, but that Mr. Chamberlain restrained him, preferring to let Russia take that initiative. The Manchester Guardian reported: “The Allies are moving toward intervention in the Finnish War” (see p. 24).

Putting an end to guessing, in which the Germans had gone too low, the Russians too high, Paris admitted that France has 275,000 men under arms in the Near East. London admitted that Great Britain has 500,000 men there—and then tried to suppress the figure. The Australians and New Zealanders landing at Suez were reported to number 30,000, volunteers all. Further attention was drawn to this troop pool by the arrival in Cairo, Egypt of its commander, fox-smart little General Maxime Weygand, to join Lieut. General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell, Britain’s Near East commander, in reviewing an Anglo-Egyptian contingent, three-quarters British and largely mechanized, drawn up on the desert just outside Heliopolis. The line extended for a mile and a half, with vehicles standing three to six deep. The reviewing party was an hour and a half making its circuit. Next day General Weygand inspected the Suez Canal defenses.

General Weygand was fresh from checking over Turkey’s armed forces, which number another 200,000 regulars, 700,000 reserves. If there was any doubt about what Turkey’s Foreign Minister Saracoglu meant when, on his way to last fortnight’s Balkan Entente meeting, he said: “Turkey is not neutral but only nonbelligerent for the moment,” it was dispelled last week by a sudden Turkish gesture. Under the emergency powers voted to the Government by Parliament last month, Turkey seized the Krupp shipyards on the Golden Horn and dismissed 20 German technicians employed there outfitting two new Turkish submarines, together with 60 other Germans working at the Gremlik naval base, in an explosives factory at Kirikkale, and in the Zonguldak coal field. Other Germans made haste to pull up stakes, for now the handwriting on Turkey’s wall was clear. Authoritative sources explained that the technicians’ dismissal was necessitated by discovery of a sabotage plot. But one Turkish spokesman ominously said: “Spring is coming.”

Berlin tried to laugh off the Golden Horn episode. “Things like that happen in Turkey,” said a spokesman. “They usually are straightened out later.” Meantime, Turkish spies reported that Russia, at whom Allied power in the Near East points most directly, was not so tranquil. Soviet engineers, advised by Germany’s great fort-builder, Dr. Fritz Todt, are rushing fortifications in the Caucasus, using several hundred thousand workmen, to defend Russia’s (and Germany’s) oil supply. Already Russia has mined the approaches to all her big Black Sea ports.

Well she might. For if any outline of the Allied Supreme War Council’s spring strategy could be drawn last week, it was this: to continue holding Germany in a vise by land and sea; to help Finland resist Russia in the north; to make that resistance stronger, and at the same time tighten the vise-grip on Germany, by “formidably” threatening Russia on the southeast.

*He broke a bone in his instep last month.